The strongest hurricane in years just put Haiti on red alert

This
NOAA satellite image taken Friday, Sept. 30, 2016 at 12:45 AM EDT
shows strengthening Hurricane Matthew moving westward at 14 MPH
across the Caribbean basin. Max sustained winds on Matthew are up
to 100 MPH as of 0600 UTC, with some of the outer bands affecting
Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.NOAA/Weather Underground via AP

Haiti issued a red alert and evacuated families from tiny
outlying islands as Hurricane Matthew, the strongest storm to
cross the Caribbean in years, shifted its route toward the
impoverished country.

Matthew is expected to make landfall in Haiti on Monday as a
major storm bringing 150 mile per hour (240 kph) winds and
extreme rain to the southern coast, simultaneously lashing
Jamaica. It will move on to Cuba early on Tuesday, the U.S.
National Hurricane Center said.

With tropical storm conditions expected to reach Haiti on Sunday
night, the prime minister's office issued the alert warning for
landslides, high waves and floods. It evacuated residents by boat
from small, exposed sandy islands in the south as a precaution on
Saturday.

"We have already started evacuations," Haitian Interior Ministry
spokesman Albert Moulion said. "The national center of emergency
operations has been activated."

On Sunday, boats were prohibited from going to sea.

The slow-moving storm is forecast to dump as much as 40 inches
(101 cm) of rain in Haiti and up to 25 inches (64 cm) in Jamaica,
the Miami-based hurricane center said.

Matthew was about 340 miles (545 km) southeast of Port-Au-Prince
on Sunday morning and the U.S. National Hurricane Center ranked
it at Category 4 of the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of
hurricane intensity. Earlier it had been ranked at the top
Category 5.

Twice as strong

Cuban President Raul Castro warned that Hurricane Matthew was
twice as powerful as Hurricane Sandy, which devastated Cuba's
colonial second city, Santiago de Cuba, in 2012 while the United
States prepared to airlift navy families from nearby Guantanamo.

"We have to prepare as it has twice the power of Sandy," Castro
was reported as saying in the Granma newspaper on a visit to
Santiago de Cuba.

"We have to prepare, there is no other choice."

A few miles east, the United States prepared to airlift some 700
spouses and children to Florida from its Guantanamo Bay naval
base to wait out the most powerful cyclone to form over the
Atlantic since Hurricane Felix in 2007.

The storm is expected to reach Santiago de Cuba and the Cuban
province of Guantanamo, where the U.S. operates a naval base and
a military prison, by Tuesday.

"The remaining military and civilian personnel will shelter in
place and be able to support recovery efforts once safe to do so
following the storm's passage," the Navy said in a statement.

Cuba began evacuating residents along its southern coast in the
east of the country and plans to gradually move tourists to safer
ground in the next 24 to 36 hours, state-run media said.

About half a dozen hotels frequented by tourists from Europe and
Canada are in the path of the storm in Cuba.

Later in the week, Matthew could affect the Bahamas and the east
coast of the United States, although forecasts so far out are
often inaccurate. Florida Governor Rick Scott said residents of
the state should prepare for the storm.

The ferocity of the storm has led to concerns of economic
devastation in the poor countries in its path.

"The hurricane will cause an interruption, obviously, in our
economic activities here," Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness
told Reuters in an interview on Saturday, saying that tourism and
agriculture could be most affected.

"We have allocated all the resources we can given our fiscal
restraints and I think that the country is prepared for the
hurricane," Holness said.

The hurricane could affect tourist destinations such as Montego
Bay. In Kingston, residents stocked up on canned foods, water and
batteries ahead of the storm, while banks and offices boarded up
their windows. Fishermen were told not to go to sea.

In MegaMart, a supermarket, Sabrina Neil, a 41-year-old radio
announcer, stood with a crowd buying flashlights.

"We’re not prepared economically and in the infrastructure. If
the hurricane is a Category 5, there is going to be a lot of
devastation – that’s the worst case scenario," she said.